Just how stupid is Sarkozy?

As President Sarkozy told Maronite Patriarch Bechara Rahi during his official visit to Paris last December, the best protection for Eastern Christians and the true guarantee of their survival in the region is the establishment of democracy and the rule of law in Arab countries. 

From this article at Foreign Policy, a great publication.

But no, M. Sarkozy, democracy will destroy Christians in the Middle East, not save them. Rather, your idealistic, illusory thoughts that democracy is possible among Muslims will destroy Christianity in the Middle East.

The First Law of the Muslim world: a secular tyrant is better than an Islamist tyrant.

Second Law: Muslim-majority countries may have tyranny or anarchy in the long term.

Third Law: Muslim-majority countries have no other options.

Muslims can have Islam, or freedom. Not both. Never.

Great new blog: The Long View

I really enjoy Justin Long's great blog on all things missiological. I mean, it's even better than mine, and he is more diligent in blogging too.

Check it out, under J Long in my blog-roll.

Reformation Fun Time! Luther Insult Generator

"A quantum leap forward in Reformation scholarship."
--Abu Daoud


Luther Insult Generator

Egypt: Meet the new boss...same as the old boss

As I have said before, Islamic societies simply do not have the capacity for freedom and liberty. Just as a cook cannot build a table, and a carpenter can't prepare a great feast, so an Islamic society simply does not have the cultural resources to ensure freedom. This all goes back to the Prophet. Once you take a tyrant like Muhammad and make him 'the ideal man' (الانسان الكامل), you can never have freedom or liberty, or, for that matter, human rights and dignity.

اين الاسلام موجود، هناك لا حرية

From USA Today:

A year after the revolution, many Egyptians -- already suffering under the weight of a wretched economy -- see an undemocratic society where the military and Islamic ideologues are hoarding power while changing nothing. Though some are pleased that a form of law shaped by the Quran is coming to Egypt, others wonder whether they have swapped one corrupt and suppressing dictatorship for another.

The hated laws enforced by Mubarak that permitted police to imprison people without trial remain in effect. (Incidentally, Mubarak is now facing his own form of Egyptian justice -- and possibly the death penalty -- in an ongoing trial over the killing of demonstrators during last year's uprising. His two sons also face trial on corruption charges.)

Read it all here, by Oren Dorell.

Iranian Christians: Islam is like imperialism

The topic of Iranian Christians is very interesting to me, and here is an interesting paragraph from one writer:


For many Iranian Christians, Islam is almost a form of cultural imperialism. According to the understanding of Iranian Christians, in Islam one must have an Arabic name and pray in Arabic and read the Qur’an in Arabic and face an Arab city during those prayers. This is not a satisfactory situation for some non-Arabs. One convert I spoke with explained that in his teens, before his conversion, his father would wake him up early in the morning to say his prayers. He would face the family garden and pray in Farsi. His father reprimanded him for this and he answered, ‘Well it’s better than facing the wall in my room!’

Well worth your time. Check it out here.

One Iranian apostate on 'the fraud of Islam'

From the website of Amil Imani, an Iranian ex-Muslim, and from what I gather not a Christian, in case you are curious:

Adding insult to injury, Islam has powerful and unwitting allies in the masses of good-hearted gullible Americans who bend over backwards to protect the long cherished principle of religious freedom. And it is this magnificent provision of our society that made Hillary Clinton, for example, reissue a visa to the likes of Tariq Ramadan who come to exploit the benign provisions of a benevolent system for establishing Islamic enslavement.

Well, gullible Americans, what do you think?

Read it all here. And also, check out this provocative cartoon from his website. So again, is this fair or unfair? Accurate or not?

J Casper: A Prayer for Egypt

J Casper, over at A Sense of Belonging, is one of my favorite commentators on the current events in Egypt. He is thoughtful, well-informed, and irenic.

I especially appreciate his Friday Prayer. Every Friday he composes a prayer to God for Egypt--an insightful and informative prayer.

It is a creative model of mission, and I commend him and his blog to you.


Most recent Friday Prayer

A Sense of Belonging

--Abu Daoud

Libya, the Decline of the Nation-State and the Rise of the City-State

For those of you, my few, faithful readers, who have been reading this blog for a while, you will know my hypothesis about the future of Europe. (<---Check out the comments on that one, egad!) I don't believe that entire countries will, in their parliaments and whatnot, go Islamic. The shari'a will not come in from above, but from below.

As larger and larger urban areas become Islamized (and it is happening very quickly), shari'a will not need to come in from above, through the traditional processes of legislation. Rather, it will come in from below, from people willing to enforce it and profit from it, and from the fact that the ethnic-European police will not even enter a lot of those neighborhoods.

So we are talking about de-facto City States, not de jure Nation States, going Islamic. That seems like an incontrovertible trend to me, and I would love to see any evidence pointing away from this reality. The nation state as a model will become increasingly unimportant, I project, as Western Civilization continues to decline, and the Islamic cultures overcome the sterile remains of the Englihtenment.
My latest piece of evidence for this is the total chaos we now see in Libya.

I am really not happy about this, but it appears that Libya, and indeed the entirety of Tripoli, has been reduced to warlordism and rule by militia (even worse than my city-state model....Europe may well get there, but the City-State model will come first). Read all about it at the IHT. Here is a snippet:

Residents say some of the fighters have sought to preserve law and order in the midst of government helplessness. Militias from Benghazi and Zintan are trying to protect a refugee camp of 1,500 people driven from their homes in Tawergha by fighters from Misurata, who bitterly blamed them for aiding Colonel Qaddafi’s assault on their town. Since the Tawerghans arrived in the camp, which once housed Turkish construction workers in Tripoli, Misurata militiamen have staged raids five or six times there despite the presence of the other militias, detaining dozens, many of them still in custody. 

The rest is HERE.

Daniel Greenfield on the bankruptcy of Islam

A quote from the article:

Islam was a predecessor of power movements like Communism and Nazism, its leader worship grimly real, as any cartoonist who has tried to draw a picture of Mohammed knows, or anyone who has seen Shiites cut their children bloody while crying out in mourning for Caliph Ali. Its theology is still incapable of embracing anything higher than its own will to power. Its objects of worship are its warleaders, its soldiers and its atrocities.

Greenfield's argument in this article is that Islam is incapable of producing a just, stable government, and that every revolution replaces one sort of tyrant with another. In other words, the Arab Spring is a lost cause. What do you think?

Read it all at FrontPage Magazine. And just in case you weren't sure how he feels, one more quote:


The Arab Spring is a misnomer because Islam exists in opposition to the spring, to the renewal of human energies and creative capacities. Its natural season is the wasteland where life has no capacity for growth.

John Paul II on 'inculturation'

On the one hand the Gospel message cannot be purely and simply isolated from the culture in which it was first inserted (the biblical world or, more concretely, the cultural milieu in which Jesus of Nazareth lived), nor, without serious loss, from the cultures in which it has already been expressed down the centuries; it does not spring spontaneously from any cultural soil; it has always been transmitted by means of an apostolic dialogue which inevitably becomes part of a certain dialogue of cultures.

--John Paul II
Catechesi Tradendae